More than half of the world uses email and despite the age of this medium, it’s a mainstay in digital marketing strategy for a reason. Most businesses consider email marketing as essential to their bottom line.
An email marketing agency will help you not just with open and click rates for campaigns; they’ll connect you with your target audience and convert them into customers.
Not all email marketing agencies are built the same. When hiring an email marketing agency, don’t hire the first one you find. To filter the good from the bad, you need to ask the right questions. Remember, you also want to get good ROI from your partnership and ensure they help you meet your goals.
Here are the top questions you need to ask in order to get the best agency that fits your needs.
What is your process?
The first order of operations when qualifying an email marketing agency is to ask them what their process is and how they do things.
They should be able to explain to you the intricacies of their methods in a simple way, enough for you to visualize and understand how they’re going to handle your campaigns.
Ask them what they’ll include in the emails and how they’ll segment your contact list. You can dive into the nitty gritty here if you like, but an overview will suffice.
The job of an email marketing agency is to make the process easier for your marketing and if they can’t explain their method and its benefits, there are slim chances that your team can understand it as well.
How will results be measured?
Another important point to clarify before you hire an email marketing agency is the results they’ll bring to your business.
In order to assess if an email campaign is successful, they need metrics and a way to measure them. Do they mention cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, conversion rates, or return on investment?
Delivery rates are not a good basis for results in email marketing so make sure you’re on the same page on how you define success. Ask the agency what their KPIs are and how they’ll report them to you and when.
If they can give you a satisfactory answer, then that’s a good sign that they’re the right agency for you.
What’s the timeline for these goals?
Inquire about what a realistic timeline looks like for your goals. “We’ll do it someday”, and “Results come in when they come in” are not the answers you need.
For email marketing campaigns, time is money. Email marketing campaigns that don’t work are a drain on resources and costs.
For each campaign, automation sequence, broadcast message, and email retargeting campaign, it only makes sense to ask for specific timelines for creation and launch, along with timelines for getting results or meeting specific goals.
Who have you worked with?
Before working with an email marketing agency, you need to know their track record. This is every agency’s resume. It’s a great tool for you to assess their reputation and qualifications. A positive reputation means they’ve done good work.
To ensure this, they need to show you proof that they’ve implemented similar campaigns for other clients and produced results. Ask them: What other companies have you worked with or currently working with? Are these companies in the same industry as my business?
It would be good to know if the email marketing agency has experience in the exact (or at least similar niche) your ecommerce business relates to. While the principles of email marketing more or less remain the same across industries, you’d still want some relevance to speed things up and to rely on the expertise that comes by working in the same industry vertical you operate in.
A bonus is if you can speak with one or two of their clients to learn more about their work style. If they can offer this, it speaks volumes about their transparency and culture as an organization.
Do you produce creatives or design in-house or do you outsource them?
It may be obvious but you should always find out if they outsource work.
Outsourcing is common practice but it can affect the speed and quality of an agency’s output. Hiring people outside of the agency can also put confidential assets at risk. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone but it doesn’t hurt to ask. It’s a risk you have to be aware of upfront before you decide to hire an email marketing agency.
Take the time to ask how creatives such as email design, copy, and images are produced. If they’re outsourced, ask who does the job.
These questions will give you a clear picture of what it will be like to work with the agency.
Can you provide examples of creatives ad examples you’ve produced in-house?
After they’ve answered your question on outsourcing, you can then ask them for examples of email marketing campaigns they’ve run.
Email marketing agencies worth their salt will always be creating, iterating, tweaking, testing, and rolling out campaigns, either for themselves or for their clients. If they have no samples, artwork, campaigns, or creatives to show, consider it a red flag.
What are some of the ways you’ve used A/B testing in your campaigns?
A/B testing is a crucial part of every email marketing campaign. An ideal marketing agency knows the industry inside and out and is able to test its content, tweaking it as needed.
The first stab at an email campaign is far from the best and A/B testing will polish and perfect your messaging and allow you to reach and engage with your target audience better.
Ask what variables they test and why they chose them. Get to know the kind of tests they’ve done and what results they got. Asking these will bring you closer to a hiring decision.
How much will I be charged and how often?
Don’t be afraid to talk money in detail so you avoid surprises down the line. The price will be affected by the software and email provider you pick. Make sure you know their fee for email management as well.
Most likely, they will bill by the hour so doublecheck their process and the number of hours they need. As always, proceed with caution before signing a long-term contract. Make sure to read the fine print and ask all your questions before inking the deal.
How do you gather inspiration and how can we decide on campaigns together?
Best email marketing agencies don’t just rely on collective creativity. They also depend on the inspiration they can find from other clients they’ve worked with, the ongoing campaigns different businesses use, and more.
Agencies don’t just invent “awesomeness”; a large part of creativity also comes from inspiration.
So, where does your agency come up with inspiration? Is it from overall advertising and marketing campaigns all around? Do they use sites like ReallyGoodEmails, Dribble, or elsewhere on the web?
Note: Panoramata is a tool that helps pick the best campaign ads and email examples on boards for inspiration.
How do you identify competitors?
Before working with your ecommerce business, how does your agency go about gathering intelligence on your competitors?
In other words, what does your agency do about competitive intelligence and competitor benchmarking, and how does it find your competitors in the first place?
Email marketing agencies—if working specifically for one or two industry verticals and ecommerce categories (see above)—would have specific lists or processes to quickly identify your competitors. You’d want to know how they do it.
Note: Tools like Panoramata are a must-have for every agency that works specifically with email marketing campaigns because they help launch campaigns the smart way. Panoramata will guide you with inspiration, active lists, compilation, and gathering intelligence quickly and efficiently.
What tools do you use and what tools are you comfortable with using?
Does your agency use tools like Litmus which helps build, test, personalize, and analyze email campaigns before sending them? What kind of tools does your email marketing agency use for email delivery?
What other tools do they use for deployment, measuring, testing, analyzing, and reporting for email marketing?
Another consideration is what CRM they’ll use.
There are a variety of CRMs, most of which you can test first before committing to. Your CRM should work across all channels so you can see your contacts’ activity regardless of where they came from. The agency’s answer to this question should align with your goals.
How will we work together?
If you’re asking this question, most likely the email marketing agency has answered the previous questions for you. At this point, you want to find out how you can communicate with each other and how they’ll work with your marketing team.
Will they have a point person you can approach or deal with throughout the process or will you be in touch with multiple people for updates? There will often be an account manager who will be the main point of contact but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
This question will give you a clear picture of the day-to-day of what dealing with them will be like so you don’t get any unwanted surprises down the road.
Wrap-up
These are just some of the questions you should ask your email marketing agency. Only when you’re satisfied with the answers should you proceed with hiring. We wish you all the best on your brand’s marketing journey!
